Thu, 21 Oct 2004

Driving around Farmington, NM is a little different from driving
around California.

Heading out of town, we passed the Permian Power Tong
building. I guess you'd better be careful when complaining
about your electricity bill in Farmington! Especially if you
want to assert that it comes from the Mesozoic, or something.
Not long after that, we passed Jimmy's Swabbing Service.
I don't think I want to know too many details about that,
nor about the Four Corners Bull Test Station we saw later.

Update 11/8/2006: Someone from the Permian Power Tong wrote
to let me know that they're an oilfield service company, not
an electric company.

We stopped at the Aztec Ruins, so misnamed because early
white settlers apparently thought these Anasazi ruins were left
by the Aztecs (?). It's a small park, with one trail, but the
ruins are excellent and the guide is full of information about
the architecture. The structures were originally built by
Chacoans and most of the lower masonry is similar to what
we saw in Chaco Canyon, but was later modified (for repairs
and additions) in a style more similar to Mesa Verde.
Then, much later, some of the masonry was re-done by the
park service in a well meaning but misguided attempt to
stabilize the fragile structures, with the result that there's
a lot of modern concrete, metal drains, and other anachronisms
and apparently it's sometimes hard for modern researchers to be
sure what came from which era.

The Chacoan work is the most beautiful. They liked to alternate
layers of large bricks with small, or red with other colors, whereas
the Mesa Verdeans used fairly uniform large bricks everywhere.
Someone who came along later (perhaps the Mesa Verde group, perhaps
a later tribe) added rounded river rocks in places, from the nearby
Animas river. The Animas may also have been used to float the
hundreds or thousands of logs needed for the roofs of the
structures; the wood apparently came from the mountains,
near Durango, since it's wood which wasn't available locally.

Although the park service tries to be much more careful now,
we saw some modern repairs on the structure while we took the
self-guided tour: Navajo bricklayers pounded sandstone
with a hammer, chipping flakes off to make it the right shape
to fit into the spot being repaired.

Outside of the park, we explored the town of Aztec, which has a nice
little suburban downtown area surrounded by miles of scrubland with
residential trailers. We noticed that the downtown area had a
predominance of Kerry signs, unlike Farmington and the rural areas
outside Aztec where Bush signs prevailed.

We took back roads from Aztec, eventually passing through Mancos
(the Mancos Motocross, Now Serving Elk Burgers -- what more
could you want? -- and the Reptile Reserve of Southwest Colorado)
and the poshest highway rest stop we've seen anywhere, at
Sleeping Ute Mountain, which offered its own hiking and pet
exercise trails.

Our plan was to stay tonight in Monticello, UT, which is close to
Canyonlands' Needles district and lots of other interesting places.
The first hotel we tried should have given us a clue as to what
was coming: the sign proclaimed "Big Buck Display!" A big dollar
bill? wondered Dave.
But it turned out this is the beginning of Utah's week-long
deer hunting season, and that Monticello is the deer hunting
capital of southeastern Utah (for some reason).
We pushed on to Blanding instead.

Blanding looked like a bigger town in the AAA guide (more hotels)
but isn't really. Fortunately, the Best Western has wi-fi
(the only place in town, unlike Monticello which has two hotels
and a cafe). The router gives the wrong address for the DNS server,
but we guessed at the right address and edited /etc/resolv.conf,
and things work okay as long as you remember to do that before
making any net connections (otherwise the wrong DNS info gets
cached by some proxy server somewhere).

Dave went to the office to see if anyone knew about this.
He was told: "They just fired up the system two weeks ago,
and it has been slow," but no one knew any more detail than that.